iefje wrote:I have listened to "Voyage" again this morning from the original LP, still a fantastic album. On most tracks, Alan Jones doesn't just play 'accompanying' bass guitar, but also some sort of lead bass guitar with added phase and distorted effects, especially on the tracks "Chain Reaction", "Pendulum Force" and "Air Quake". On the record sleeve it says that the synthesizers were 'programmed' by Francis Monkman, but synthesizers of that time were mostly or only analogue if I'm right and didn't have a memory to store presets in, or am I wrong?
If the album was recorded in 1977, then it must have been around the time of The Shadows' "20 Golden Dates", where Francis Monkman, Alan Jones and of course Brian were part of.
There were synthesizers around in 1977/1978 which could hold presets (I'm thinking particularly of the Prophet V which F. Monkman used a lot but Voyage might
just pre-date the introduction of that). I think, in those days, the "programming" partly referred to the setting up of patches on an analogue synth because doing so was such a complicated task (although it was probably easier by the late 70s - in the early days of the modular Moog synths you'd have someone, who probably had a degree in Physics, "programme" the sounds and then a musician actually play it), but it might also refer to the programming of one or more sequencers (again, pretty basic in those days, but still available).